How Twitter's Management Makes Friends ... And Enemies

Since its earliest days, Twitter has depended on the kindness of
strangers. Companies like Yahoo and LinkedIn lent a hand when it was just a
fledgling startup, with little to its name but its unrealized
potential.

But now that it's grown up into a position of strength, with 200
million users, Twitter doesn't seem as kind.

In recent months, it's feuded with LinkedIn, Instagram, and Tumblr—engaging in hardball
tactics that seem far afield from its friendly roots.

To understand why, it helps to go back to Twitter's humble
beginnings—and the mistakes and fights it's had along the way.

From the day Twitter opened
its doors to developers in 2006, coders intrigued by the idea
of a real-time network for broadcasting messages, as well as
publishers looking for an outlet for their news and ordinary
people who wanted a voice, have built up its value, 140
characters at a time.

As have investors, who valued the private company at $8 billion
in its most recent financing and put what CEO Dick Costolo calls
a "truckload of money" in its bank account. And the more than
1,000 employees who have put their heart and soul into turning
its cofounders' idea into a real business that's expected to
nearly triple its revenue from an estimated $350 million in 2012
to
$1 billion next year.

To whom much is given, much is expected.

This summer, Twitter unexpectedly took away the ability for
Instagram and Tumblr users to find people they followed on
Twitter and add them as friends on those services.

The reason is simple: Twitter has changed the rules for
developers, and it restricts what apps that "attempt to
replicate Twitter's core user experience" can do. It did this
because it decided it's better to maintain tight control over how
people access tweets.

Specifically, developers "must not use Twitter Content or
other data collected from end users to create or maintain a
separate status update or social network database or service."

That, we understand, includes the lists of accounts Twitter users
follow.

As far as that goes, that makes sense: Why should Twitter help
Instagram, now owned by Facebook, or Tumblr, seen as a rival in
real-time sharing, build up their user bases?

And of course, these rules apply to everyone. So the last thing
you'd expect, say, Flickr's new mobile app to do is let you find
friends on Twitter.

And yet the new Flickr app does
exactly that, letting you search for friends on Twitter who
use Flickr and add them as connections on Flickr.

What gives? Twitter and Yahoo wouldn't comment, but we gather
from our sources that Twitter doesn't view Flickr's mobile app as
duplicating what Twitter does. (Even though Twitter and Flickr
both now let you take a photo, edit it, and post it to
Twitter—right down to
using the same company to power their photo filters.)

It's contradictory, of course. Flickr is a photo-based social
network for sharing what's happening in the world, just like
Instagram is, and just like Twitter hopes to be.

It just happens to be one that's owned by Yahoo, not Facebook,
and one that Twitter doesn't feel threatened by.

Things are far frostier between Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram.
Twitter reportedly tried to acquire both of those startups, only
to be rebuffed. Instagram sold to Facebook, of course, while
Twitter acquired a Tumblr rival, Posterous.

Twitter seems to be sending a hardball message: Sell to us, or
we'll cut you off.

Have some sympathy for Twitter: That's a tactic its leaders
learned the hard way, first-hand.

Facebook reportedly tried to buy Twitter for $500 million in
2008. In 2010, Twitter launched
a new feature which allowed users to find their Facebook
friends on the service. Facebook immediately cut it off.

Twitter has been similarly harsh with developers of Twitter
clients. It once encouraged the development of mobile clients and
other third-party apps for reading and sending tweets, and
announced plans to partner with them on selling advertising
through those services.

Then it realized that it had made a big mistake, that the
multiplicity of ways to access Twitter confused consumers, and it
changed the rules.

The bottom line: If you want to partner with Twitter, you can
send your content its way. If you want to use Twitter's content,
you'd best step carefully.

Let's be clear: Twitter is a business. It's responsible primarily
to its shareholders, employees, and users, not to rivals or
opportunists. And it's human to want to be generous where you
can, especially to people who have treated you well. Yahoo's
endorsement of Twitter in 2010 gave it a powerful boost.

But much of Twitter's value lies in its ambition to be the
Internet's town square, a meeting place and public forum. To the
extent that opaque rules and inconsistent behavior scare people
away from Twitter, it harms itself and everyone it's hoping to
serve.

It would be one thing if those rules were clear and consistently
enforced. The Flickr exception, though, is troubling: It suggests
that if you can stay friends with Twitter, it will bend the rules
for you.